Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Some lead lives of loud desperation.
romeostevensit
I really like this post. I’d been previously pointing people to the checklist from Bill Hamilton’s Saints and Psychopaths for lack of anything else readily linkable but will start linking this.
In trying to write some responses to some of the things I have personal experience with and feel like I want to add to it highlights what you said at the beginning, it is really really hard to think clearly and write clearly about this topic because there are always multiple interpretations of the behaviors in question. Thank you for the effort of writing it.
WRT positive things to look for I’ll add this: A palpable sense of the frame moving around organically. With frame controllers, if something threatens their frame there is a palpable sense of tension within the group.
Fuzzier: do people make fun of the leader(s)
To their face
Behind their back
Not at all
My favorite scenes have always had 1 as far as I can remember.
Below an excerpt from something I recently wrote about abusive patterns in spiritual communities:
Good teachers don’t encourage hungry ghost dynamics in students. This touches on a bunch of entangled dynamics which I’ll do my best to describe. The people coming to a teacher often fall into the category of looking for someone to fix everything that is wrong with their life. Even if the seeker logically rejects this narrative it can often be an emotional reality that they are looking for a dharma daddy. Bad teachers will encourage this dynamic in a few ways, an important one being that they don’t undermine seeker’s tendency to look to them for all the answers. I’ve seen this first hand where everything the teacher in a space said was a corrective, with the underlying principles never clearly expounded. This lead to an evaporative cooling process whereby people not susceptible to this sort of attack simply left, leaving an environment where everyone is deferring to the person all the time. New people entering who don’t know any better then copy what they see. There was also a sense of pride for masochistic tendencies, that others ‘couldn’t handle’ the ‘real’ things that were going on in the scene.
Hungry ghosts feel highly uncertain about themselves and the world, they always feel they are doing everything wrong. They are drawn towards the overconfident people who act as though they are doing everything correctly. This will select for narcissistic or exploitative teachers. This dovetails with the Guru model which, as I understand it, has been poorly translated to the west. A good teacher is less like a priest and more like a PhD advisor. This also ties in with the point about questions mentioned previously. Hungry ghosts will be satisfied by glossy answers, assuming that any lack of understanding is a failure on their part. They will also create an environment hostile to real questions as they don’t want anything deflating the bubble of the infallibility of the teacher. There will also be a lot of interactions that seem to be about mutual validation of being on the correct path instead of openness to multiple approaches.
Such hungry ghost dynamics can be detected by how engaging with a scene makes you feel. If you exit feeling agitated, like you are doing something wrong, like others are making more progress than you and you need to ‘hurry up’, like there is winning to be done, like you are overloaded with things you need to learn, these are all bad signs. Good teaching creates more relaxed looseness, more playfulness, more freedom, more feeling of confidence and the tractability of practice. In short, the teachings themselves creating a palpable sense of less dukkha.
This would seem to be counter to what I’ll call the high discipline focused schools. I won’t say there’s nothing to discipline, especially as specific periods of formal practice. But given how poor most schools are in producing people with obvious levels of insight I think the burden of proof lies with them to show that what they are offering works. A higher level of commitment that is asked for should also come with a higher level of demonstrated effects. (I’ll add here abusers will avoid any explicitness about the commitments they are actually asking for and receiving from you. This is for deniability later. After all, you did those things of ‘your own volition.’)
And just because it can never be said too many times: if something looks hierarchical, cloistered, with members sleeping with each other, and personal finances becoming entangled in the org run far far away very fast.
- 23 Jan 2023 23:17 UTC; 12 points) 's comment on Frame Control by (
IMO, A large number of mental health professionals simply aren’t a good fit for high intelligence people having philosophical crises. People know this and intuitively avoid the large hassle and expense of sorting through a large number of bad matches. Finding solid people to refer to who are not otherwise associated with the community in any way would be helpful.
I had a realization while reading this post, that underlying all the complicated sociology and game theory of changing family and romantic relationships and gender relations and all of it there is a simple economic fact: people are wealthier than in the past, and wealthier people don’t need each other as badly.
- 14 Dec 2023 13:10 UTC; 19 points) 's comment on Is being sexy for your homies? by (
Idea for a short story in which everyone has to take such a literacy test and is restricted to a lifestyle of only having the luxuries they understand.
The meta lesson I learned by squinting at things and holding them at arms distance was this: don’t be middle class. Live like a grad student and then retire having never acclimated to consumptive patterns that seem to be more about auditioning to be upper class than about enjoyment of the life material prosperity can provide.
I believe many people interpret claims that they might be causing harm as a social attack and not about causal reality.
Currently the burden of proof is on those who claim danger, while we would prefer the burden of proof to be on those who claim safety. Burden of proof moves are regulated by tribal circuitry IME.
- 5 Jul 2022 7:30 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on The inordinately slow spread of good AGI conversations in ML by (
Schindler had a concrete thing he was able to do. He had a money->people pipeline. I think most of the ways rationalists are feeling smug about being ahead of the curve here boils down to an error that we are still making: okay you’ve made the update, now how does it propagate through the world model to generate meaningfully different actions? Who has taken action? Has anyone who has taken action talked about it anywhere? Do any of the proposed or taken actions look remotely helpful?
The spiritual world is rife with bad communities and I’ve picked up a trick for navigating them. Many of the things named in this post could broadly be construed under the heading of “weird power dynamics.” Isolation creates weird power dynamics, poor optionality creates weird power dynamics, and drugs, and skewed gender ratios, and etc etc.
When I spot a weird power dynamic I name it out loud to the group. A lot of bad groups will helpfully kick me out themselves. I naturally somewhat shy away from such actions of course, but an action that reliably loses me status points with exactly the people I don’t want to be around is great.
It’s the emperor’s clothes principle: That which can be destroyed by being described by a beginner should be. And the parable illustrates something important about how it works. It needs to be sincere, not snark, criticism, etc.
I hope these responses help people understand that the hostility to journalists is not based on hyperbole. They really are like this. They really are competing to wreck the commons for a few advertising dollars.
I can sympathize with the frustration, and I also think the assertion that EY has “No idea what he is talking about” is too strong. He argues his positions publicly such that detailed rebuttals can be made at all, which is a bar the vast majority of intellectuals fail at.
Edit: I reread the FDT rebuttal for the first time since it came out just to check, and I find it as unconvincing now as then. The author doesn’t grasp the central premise of FDT, that you are optimizing not just for your present universe but across all agents (many worlds or not) who implement the same decision function you are implementing.
I would summarize a dimension of the difficulty like this. There are the conditions that give rise to intellectual scenes, intellectual scenes being necessary for novel work in ambiguous domains. There are the conditions that give rise to the sort of orgs that output actions consistent with something like Six Dimensions of Operational Adequacy. The intersection of these two things is incredibly rare but not unheard of. The Manhattan Project was a Scene that had security mindset. This is why I am not that hopeful. Humans are not the ones building the AGI, egregores are, and spending egregore sums of money. It is very difficult for individuals to support a scene of such magnitude, even if they wanted to. Ultra high net worth individuals seem much poorer relative to the wealth of society than in the past, where scenes and universities (a scene generator) could be funded by individuals or families. I’d guess this is partially because the opportunity cost for smart people is much higher now, and you need to match that (cue title card: Baumol’s cost disease kills everyone). In practice I expect some will give objections along various seemingly practical lines, but my experience so far is that these objections are actually generated by an environment that isn’t willing to be seen spending gobs of money on low status researchers who mostly produce nothing. i.e. funding the 90%+ percent of a scene that isn’t obviously contributing to the emergence of a small cluster that actually does the thing.
I think people should write whatever they’re excited about and only afterwards decide where to post it
A dark pattern that I and many others unintentionally instantiate is overloading people’s working memory with more considerations than the other person can keep track of at which point they tend to become deferential on the topic in question and with repetition become deferential in general. This is a terrible dynamic that will reinforce itself if efforts are not made to push against it IME. In practice what happens is that most people bounce off the person doing it, a few stick to the person doing it, the people who might critique it have left so the people sticking around now have an environment that agrees that deferring to this person makes sense.
This feels related to what is mentioned about leaders not talking and the prior art of ‘Gurus tend to be allergic to one another.’
I’d also just like to note that I am overwhelmingly in favor of more public philosophy discussions.
What do we expect to see at year 5 for the prediction to be true at year 10?
My understanding is that the amount of ethanol we’re taking about here on a daily basis constitutes something like the amount you’d get eating an extra piece of fruit or so. Though I don’t know where I originally saw the estimate or if it is good. Does anyone want to do some fermi estimates?
A lot of the smaller items are covered in early retirement type blog posts such as ERE and MMM. They both also have books out which are organized better than the blogs. The big ones tend to be things like
people not running the numbers on home ownership: After playing a lot with the NYT rent-buy calculator and both current prices and historical rates of housing inflation in major markets (ie the places you’d actually want to live) I found only two scenarios that paid off. Both hinged on being very confident you were going to stay in the same place at least ten years, which given the opportunity costs of not being mobile for the best available job as well as the often underestimated commuting costs to QoL is a pretty high variance bet. The two scenarios were buying a 2 bedroom condo and renting out the 2nd bedroom, and buying a 3 bedroom 2 bath house with a converted garage, living in the garage while renting out the house and then flipping to living in the house and renting the garage when family planning needs kick in down the road. And this was still only beating renting in advantageous markets like Denver, Austin, Raleigh. Terrible in popular places like Seattle, SF, NY, Chicago etc. Assuming you plow a decent chunk of your salary into index funds otherwise.
Not optimizing their career due to short term comfort considerations. The long term impact of optimally switching to advance several times *early* in your career is massive. Most people don’t apply often enough to nearly a wide enough range of positions in many different cities with excuses like ‘my friends and family are here’ and only counting the immediate salary difference rather than the huge trajectory shift.
A general habit of buying stuff, 90% of which sits unused 99% of the time. Which also causes one to rent bigger places on average.
A general habit of not TDTing ‘reasonable’ convenience expenses and finding more permanent solutions that cost less over a lifetime.
As mentioned in the recent putanumonit post completely insane financial planning folk beliefs. Not parking money in a well run robo-index like Schwab’s.
Dating people who reinforce their bad habits, which feels like validation from the inside. Especially in the justification that those living at lower consumptive levels are ‘missing out on life’ or wasting their time. (They might not be making optimal time-money tradeoffs but the person hasn’t actually checked this, it’s just a reflexive defense)
Not valuing slack enough to fight tooth and nail for it over the longer run.
I don’t know, I’m probably forgetting stuff. The real juice tends to be in stances more than individual decisions. The primary legible stance is something like: once you finish Mario Kondoing your possessions, start in on your processes.
I expected to find them mostly trash. I updated strongly in two ways: 1. A surprising proportion seemed like a reasonable use of time (as a topic to investigate or seek improvements in. Maybe 1⁄4) 2. Of that 1⁄4, a few seem high impact enough that it’s worth the other 75% being crap.
Meta: sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel fast. Sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel carefully. I think this disagreement comes up quite a bit in rationalist circles especially because of founder effects: the tension exists in Eliezer’s writing as well.
In the tradition of What is Seen and What is Not Seen: Said doesn’t see the posts that aren’t written because people feel like they would have to write a sequence justifying themselves carefully for the thing they really want to talk about.
I think it is also quite valuable to slow down on aspects of status quo thinking and communicating that are usually quickly glossed over. Indeed, this is the heart of Buddhism. My own frustration isn’t with method but that Said seems to choose non central examples often. What’s interesting is that in this case authenticity does seem to be pretty central.
Anyway, I’m writing this partially in appreciation for what habryka is trying to communicate here, since it is high effort and in expectation low reward.
Humans who won typically just choose harder goals and don’t spend a lot of time patting themselves on the back online. Fwiw superforecasters were disproportionately ssc readers, I interviewed four of them. Also, lw, like most self help communities, attracts the walking wounded. See mental health incidence in the ssc survey. Going from well below average in several metrics to slightly above doesn’t look impressive from the outside but is very large from the inside.